The night after the election, one can conclude that all pollsters in the Netherlands did a bad job of predicting the election results. All polls were at least off by 20 seats (out of 150), and I expect the newspapers to make headlines of this in the next days. See the table below for the final predictions (before election day), the exit poll and final election results. The last row shows how much each poll was off (in the number of seats
**Poll volatility **
Below, you find the summed changes in parliamentary seats over all parties in consecutive opinion polls for the four main polling firms in the Netherlands in the lead up to the 2012 elections. I will update the table below in the next weeks.
This overview follows from my earlier post on Dependent Interviewing. Maurice de Hond (peil.nl) is the only survey pre-loading earlier voter preferences into survey questions.
I was re-reading one of the papers I wrote as part of my dissertation on survey data quality in panel surveys. The paper deals with the effects of the introduction of an interviewing technique called Dependent Interviewing in the British Household Panel Survey. I wrote this paper together with Annette Jackle, and if you are interested after reading the next bit, you can download a working paper version of it here.